1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to computerized tools, which help to paint fine art paintings, specifically to transform a digital picture into a customized ‘Paint by Number’ style high quality painting.
2. Prior Art
Having a painter paint ones family portrait or ones favorite scenery on a large canvas is an expensive luxury that not everyone can afford. Painting that fine art piece your self requires talents and skills that most people don't have. Crafters, who want to express themselves in painting on canvas, paper, wood and many other surfaces, are limited to one's own abilities of drawing abstracts, live or still objects, and of animating them with paint or other pigmented mediums. A common solution to enable crafters to express themselves in painting are the “Paint by Numbers” style crafting kits, which provide crafters with “color-in line” drawings for them to fill in. These kits offer crafters a limited number of non-original artifacts to create (usually one per kit). Further, un-like free-hand painting, the “Paint by Numbers” method limits the crafters to pre-determined subjects, paints, tools, surfaces and sizes, and as a result, the finished paintings created with ‘paint by number’ kits are simple and somewhat childish.
Solutions to this problem, some of them in a form of a computer program, have been focusing primarily on image manipulation, the methods for transferring a color picture into inline drawing, while leaving the crafters on their own when it comes to the actual drawing and painting steps.
To create a high quality life-like painting one needs to mix paints. A crafter cannot achieve a highly artistic result when using pre-maid paints from the store, because pre-maid paints cannot imitate exactly the desired colors of the objects one wants to paint. For instance, to achieve a certain skin color of a girl in a picture, one has to mix several ready-made colors in order to match the exact desired shade of skin color. Mixing paints to achieve the right color requires ‘good eye’, talent, knowledge and experience.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,356,274 to Spector (2002 Mar. 12) discloses a kit of computer program and set of markers, which is intended for children. The program accepts a digital image as input, and prints a sheet of paper with outline for a child to color. This patent holds the typical disadvantages of the ‘Paint by Number’ method. It produces only a printer paper size drawing and the colors are limited to the pre-determined set of markers. This patent does not faithfully reproduce the full range of colors included in a color picture, but only approximate these colors, so the result is a very basic form of painting—simple and childish.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,252,996 to Putnam (2001 Jul. 26) discloses a method for transformation of a photographic picture into templates for painting. This patent only produces templates, while leaving the crafters on their own when it comes to the actual drawing and painting steps. Most crafters will encounter difficulties when trying to match the right paints and their mixes to the regions of the template, in order to achieve likeness to the original digital picture. It is almost impossible for the average crafter to create a high quality painting with likeness to the original picture without getting guidance on how to mix paints and apply them to the different color regions of the painting.
Since the present invention uses a computer to convert a digital picture into a line drawing, of prior art interest are line drawing conversion software that are in the market, such as Adobe Photoshop by Adobe Inc.